Constance Gordon-Cumming

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland·1837-1924

Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924) was a Scottish painter and travel writer who spent much of her adult life crossing Asia and the Pacific with a paintbox and notebook. Born at Altyre near Forres into a large, well-connected Scottish family, she grew up amid artistic visitors such as Edwin Landseer, and later became a friend of fellow travel-artists Marianne North and Isabella Bird. From the 1870s she painted her way through India, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand, China and the American West, producing over a thousand watercolours along with vivid published accounts of her journeys. In Hawaii, arriving in 1879, she was among the earliest artists to record the active volcanoes, work later associated with the so-called Volcano School. In Yosemite she hung her sketches outside a valley hotel in what is considered the park's first art exhibition. Her books include At Home in Fiji, Fire Fountains, and Granite Crags. She also supported a school for the blind in China founded on William Hill Murray's numeral reading system. She died at Crieff, where she had settled with her sister, and her paintings are held today in Hawaii, New Zealand and elsewhere.